Bike trail advocates find resistance from light rail supporters

There’s a stretch of old railroad tracks
running through the bustling, lively area of Hyde Park just off the
Smith-Edwards Road exit. Businesses thrive among a quiet, upscale
residential area; children board buses for school. Just to the side of
the road, though — away from the life and hullabaloo — is something very
different. Something lifeless.

It is a set of abandoned railroad tracks,
called “Wasson Way,” that haven’t felt the touch of a train since 2009,
when transportation company Norfolk Southern stopped service along the
stretch. The tracks span 6.5 miles, beginning near Xavier University,
snaking through some of Cincinnati’s healthiest residential and business
districts, including Evanston, Norwood, Hyde Park, Oakley, Mount
Lookout, Fairfax and Mariemont, and ending near the 78-mile Little Miami
Bike Trail.

During the past three years, the
rust-ridden spurs only offer life to unkempt tufts of grass and the
occasional wave of graffiti.

Even with the overgrowth, the tracks have
hardly gone unnoticed. Norfolk Southern still owns the land, but as the
property is threatened by decomposition and the looming threat of
developer buyouts, debates about what to do with the space have heated
up. And Norfolk Southern hasn’t been involved in the dialogue at all —
the company has made no plans to sell, update or maintain the property,
according to a statement from Dave Pidgeon, manager of public relations
for Norfolk Southern.

As Norfolk Southern remains apathetic
about the state of the tracks, coalitions have formed to transform the
prime real estate into something greater. Now, the differing visions of
the two sides — bike trail and light rail — are holding up any
Cincinnati City Council decision on how to move forward.

The Wasson Way Project (the “bike” side)
advocates the transformation of the tracks into a bike and pedestrian
trail. Jay Andress, president of the project, says the trail would link
120,000 Cincinnatians to more than 100 miles of bike trails stretching
all the way north into Springfield, Ohio, with spurs reaching as far as
Dayton, thanks to the trails’ proximity to the famed Little Miami Trail.
“What’s missing is the connection to Cincinnati — that’s what Wasson
would do,” Andress said at a March 6 meeting of City Council’s strategic
growth committee. “And a bike trail in the middle of a city? I can’t
think of anything better you could do for your citizens.”

The Wasson Way Project’s mission is both
to preserve a valuable transportation gateway and bring an influx of
economic growth to Cincinnati via cycling tourism.

Related content

This opportunity is literally one in a million for
Cincinnati,” Eric Oberg, Midwest manager of trail development at
Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, said at the meeting.

A Hyde Park business recently asked to
purchase a portion of the strip of track from Norfolk Southern to pave
over for a parking lot. Although Norfolk Southern was willing to comply,
Cincinnati City Council stepped in to preserve the trail. But it’s not
realistic to guard the land forever, says Laure Quinlivan, the
councilwoman who heads the strategic growth committee.

That’s what the “light rail” side wants
City Council to do — essentially make the land off-limits until
construction to install light rail tracks begins. The theory is that the
trail is so valuably situated that it deserves a place as an actual
means of transportation, not a product of recreation.

But a light rail project is a sizably
larger undertaking than paving a bike trail, and, unlike the trail
campaigners, light rail advocates don’t seem to have much of a proposal;
it’s just an idea at this point.

“The light rail people don’t have any
plan whatsoever to preserve the land right now. It could be 20 years
before a light rail is feasibly built, and what are we going to do in
the meantime with that land? Let it sit? We can’t do that,” Quinlivan
says.

Bike trail advocates are willing to sign a
document offering the light rail legal precedence over the bike trail
in the future, meaning if a plan does come about, any and all of the
bike trail can be destroyed to make way for the light rail. “Mass
transit and bike trail folks should be natural allies,” says Oberg.

“The key point is that this rail corridor
must be kept in public ownership … if there’s not a plan in place to
preserve it, it can be sold to anyone,” Oberg adds. “Once these
corridors go away, they’re never coming back. We have to preserve this;
we’re all fighting the same fight here.”

Urban planner Randy Simes recently released two editorials in favor of the light rail option on his blog, UrbanCincy.
Despite the promise of a legal document favoring the light rail, Simes
remains skeptical that the change would ever actually occur.

“It may seem frustrating to leave the
Wasson Line in its current state of appearance, but it will be much more
frustrating to jeopardize one of the best potential light rail
corridors envisioned for the region,” Simes wrote in a March 5 blog
post. He notes case studies from all over the nation show that once a
former rail line is converted for a different use, it is nearly
impossible to take back the land for rail purposes. Simes ardently
supports bike transportation, but is perturbed that construction of
light rail over an already existing bike trail would put an unfair
monetary burden on the light rail side to deconstruct the
already-existing steel tracks and bike trail.

Bike trail advocates insist that Simes’ perspective is misinformed.

Even without the bike trail in place, a
quick survey of the 6.5-mile stretch makes it clear there are several
spots along Wasson Way that aren’t wide enough for light rail; what
exists now is a single strip of train track, and a light rail requires
two strips — standard measurements for the design of bi-directional
traffic mandate 28 feet of right-of-way. That means extensive
construction will be required to even make the double tracks feasible in
the first place.

In other words, the “burden” will be placed on the light rail project regardless.

Quinlivan says that City Council won’t
vote on a motion for Wasson Way until she sees some positive dialogue
between the two sides, so the bike trail supporters are working to
schedule a meeting with the UrbanCincy crowd to talk logistics.